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Embracing Snaps: an Interview with Canonical and Slack

This year was a big one for companies like Canonical and Slack. It also was a
big year for technologies that Canonical created to enable third-party
application support—specifically, the snap
package.

I'm sure most, if not all, of you have heard about this package manager.
In fact, it's been around since at least 2014, but it initially was developed
around Canonical's Ubuntu phone operating system. Now, although the phone
operating system has since been canceled, snaps continue to dominate the
operating system, in both the server and desktop space.

What Is a Snap?

A "snap" application package is a self-contained piece of software,
and although it originally was designed to be hosted on Ubuntu, the package will
work across a range of other Linux distributions. This isn't your
traditional APT or YUM manager hosting DEB and RPM (or other) package
formats.

Again, the appeal to snap packages is that they are self-contained (that is,
containerized). They are designed to auto-update and are safe to run. A snap
package is bundled with its dependencies, which is what allows it to run on
all other major Linux distribution without any modification. It also doesn't
have any dependency to any package manager or application store. But, don't
misunderstand this—a package manager or application store still can host one or
more snap packages; however, the snap package is not dependent to that manager.

Snapcraft is the official tool for software developers to package their
software programs in a Snap format.

Evan's team at Canonical builds the platform to make everyone's life
easier—that is, Snapcraft. And Felix's team leverages that
very same platform to bring wonderful applications, such as Slack, to your
Linux desktop.

First, for those not familiar with Slack, it's an enterprise software
platform that allows
teams and businesses (of all sizes) to communicate effectively. It's
organized, easily accessible, and more important, it allows for better and
more efficient communication than email. Slack isn't limited to
just professional use; it also can be adopted for more personal uses.